Ninja Blocks has begun shipping its eponymous Linux gadget designed to interact with sensors and automate your world.
The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on …

Re: Too expensive.

Re: Too expensive.

They have said they plan to look into supporting the Pi as a hardware platform.

They're currently based off the beaglebone, which costs ~£60, so basically you're paying £60 for the beaglebone, plus £40 for their custom hardware interface board, the 3d printed case, and access to their cloud server

Not really from Australia...

This can't be an Australian project unless they're bending the Kickstarter rules a bit. From the Kickstarter T's and C's, you need to be based in the US and supply a US social security number to register a project.

Yay

Another finish it yourself product from the world of Linux. Although this will be cool for geeks for 10 minutes like the sharp Zaurus was it will never be a successful product. For success I'm afraid you have to do the work, finish the product and then ship it. For examples, look at companies like Apple or Sony who literally do polish off their products before selling them.

Re: Yay

I don't see why Raspberry Pi-grade devices need 'the Cloud' to co-ordinate their functions. Surely a mesh network with SNMP is all that's required... but I suppose then Ninja Blocks couldn't lock you in and harvest and sell your appliance data to marketeers, could they?

Actually

First of all I agree on that processing the data in the cloud is a bad idea.

However the problem lies within stupid customers. They just aren't able to access their data via some sane way. They can't point their browsers to an IP address or an mDNS hostname. And even if they could, many of them don't have IPv6 yet, so they will not be able to access it from their mobile phones.